Come this June (2017), Tate Modern celebrates the life and works of Princess Fahrelnissa Zeid, an artist who can rightly be seen as one of the female pioneers, in the wider Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, of both modernism and abstraction in a western sense, responsive to western aesthetics and sensibilities. Abstraction, through reinterpretation of Arabic/Farsi/Osmanli/Urdu calligraphic forms, isn’t new to a region that, in Asia alone, stretches from Afghanistan, post-Mughal South Asia and Iran to the Arabian peninsula and the Levant. The wider MENA region, which skirts the Atlantic...